Budget

Trump Wants Federal Agencies to Cut Spending by 5%

By Michael Rainey and Yuval Rosenberg

President Trump instructed his cabinet secretaries Wednesday to reduce their departmental spending by 5 percent or more next year. “Some of you will say, ‘Hey, I can do much more than five,’” Trump...
Hurricane Michael Might Have Damaged More Than $1 Billion Worth of F-22s

By Michael Rainey

By the time Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle last week, most of the aircraft based at Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City had been flow out of harm’s way. But between four and 17 F-22...
Federal Deficit Jumps 17 Percent to $779 Billion

By Yuval Rosenberg

Despite a strong economy and robust job market, the federal budget deficit swelled to $779 billion in fiscal 2018, up $113 billion from 2017, according to final numbers released Monday by the...
Mnuchin Spins a False Claim About Tax Cuts and the Deficit

By Yuval Rosenberg

The Congressional Budget Office projected last week that the federal government’s fiscal 2018 deficit would total $782 billion. The final numbers will be released by the Treasury Department, but...
Pentagon Grounds All F-35s

By Michael Rainey

The U.S. Defense Department grounded all F-35 jets on Thursday, on the heels of a crash on September 28 in South Carolina. Investigators examining the loss of an F-35B, the Marine Corps’ version of...

Trump’s Border Wall: A Christmastime Clash Is Coming

By Yuval Rosenberg

There won’t be much holiday cheer on Capitol Hill this year, Politico’s Playbook warns : “Over the last few days, we’ve seen a massive ramp-up of the ‘build-the-wall’ rhetoric from key Hill...
How GOP Rhetoric on Entitlements Has Changed

By The Fiscal Times Staff

The Washington Post’s David Weigel describes how Republicans have changed their tune on Medicare and, for this year at least, largely abandoned the idea of entitlement reform: “[O]ver eight years,...
How the Army ‘Found’ $25 Billion

By Michael Rainey

The U.S. Army has been combing through its existing programs to identify potential sources of funding that can be applied to its ambitious modernization program, and according to Army Secretary Mark...
529 Plans Are Growing — and So Is Their Cost to the Government

By Yuval Rosenberg

Education savings accounts called 529 plans have grown dramatically since 2010, both in terms of the number of accounts and total assets, according to research by The Pew Charitable Trusts . And they...
The Post-Election Outlook: ‘Debt, Debt and More Debt’

By Yuval Rosenberg

The 2018 elections are looking like a lose-lose proposition for the U.S. bond market, according to Bloomberg’s Liz McCormick and Alex Harris : “If Democrats take the House, it raises the odds that...

The Pentagon’s $71 Billion Fiscal Cliff

By Yuval Rosenberg

Late last month, President Trump signed into law a $670 billion defense spending bill for fiscal 2019. Now, Travis J. Tritten writes in the Washington Examiner , the fight over the next such bill is...
Deficit Jumped to $782 Billion in 2018 – and It’s Only Going to Get Bigger

By Michael Rainey

You might have missed this with everything else going on in the world, but the Congressional Budget Office said Friday that the deficit for fiscal year 2018 rose to $782 billion, a big jump from the...
GOP Lawmakers Push Back on Trump’s Federal Pay Freeze

By Michael Rainey

Contradicting a plan announced by President Trump, Republican lawmakers have tentatively agreed to give roughly 2 million federal workers a pay 1.9 percent pay hike next year, The Washington Post...
Larry Kudlow Wants to Put a ‘Big Dent’ in Government Spending

By Yuval Rosenberg

Larry Kudlow, the director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, is once again talking up the economy and talking down the threat posed by rising debt and deficits. And once again, he’s...
Price Drops for Next Batch of F-35s

By Michael Rainey

The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin have reached an agreement on the financial terms for the next batch of F-35 Lightning IIs. The so-called Lot 11 production will include 141 stealth jets, with 91...